


Avengers: 2012 Fallout

by echo_grace



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (Temporary?) One Shot, Attention Avengers: Spoiler Alerts for the Next Decade, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Counterpart of Avengers: Hidden Heart, Gen, budding Team-as-Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24047914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echo_grace/pseuds/echo_grace
Summary: 2012 Tony's POV of Endgame-Avengers' shenanigans . . . and unravelling hints of the future.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Avengers: 2012 Fallout

**Author's Note:**

> Here's to hoping that purging some fic-beginnings from my brain-drive will clean up enough space to finish my Tron trilogy. This story - and its counterpart, Hidden Heart - may eventually continue, but it may also need a cowriter to do so.
> 
> Details are a little off in spots, as I'd only seen Endgame once before I started writing.

**Prologue**

“Sir,” Jarvis says, jerking him out of his unwanted doze. “I believe I have ascertained the causes of our . . . security breach.”

“Let’s hear it,” Natasha says, settling on the nearest stool.

“The how seems pretty obvious,” Cap says, rubbing at his jaw (. . . which should be fine by now. Why’s he acting like it still hurts?) “What we need to know is who they are and where they went –”

“If they are in league with Loki, they could be anywhere in the nine realms by now –”

“And to think, if I’d only been allowed to shoot the bastard,” Barton mutters into his glass –

“Shut it, all of you!” Tony demands, rubbing his eyes. His chest aches, but he doesn’t dare imply any trouble or weakness with the arc reactor by drawing attention to it – he’ll be lucky if the City doesn’t yank their okay for the one powering the building on account of the mess they’re already in. “What took so long, J? Was their tech really that hard to crack?”

A pause. Jarvis is hesitating, and that’s never a good thing.

“I had to dig into the archives to find equivalent work, Sir.”

“ _More_ crap Shield’s hiding?” Dr. Banner whines from under his arms. Tony snorts, inclined to agree with him.

“ _Our_ archives. Sir.”

Tony freezes, his ice tea lapping against his lips as all eyes turn on him. With thoughts of Ivan Vanko swirling in his head, he tries to keep it casual as he sets his glass down and quips, “Guess we better take this in the workshop, then.” Several voices rise in protest as he heads for the elevator, and he raises his hand to silence them as the doors open. “Did I say any of you weren’t invited?” As expected, there’s a clatter of furniture and a rush of footsteps chasing him to the elevator as he turns around. Tony kindly props the door open for the first three to enter. “Hey, Strong Arm, give Jolly Green a hand up, would you,” he ask-demands Thor, waving at Bruce still sitting at the bar. The thunder god huffs, but shoulders Dr. Banner’s arm and they shuffle-step into the elevator with the rest of them.

It’s a silent, awkward ride down three floors before they tumble out into his near-pristine sanctuary – pristine in the sense of no skid marks or grease stains on the floor, and virtually no projects besides his armor scattered around his various work stations. He’s barely started living here, and he already feels less secure than he’s ever been in Malibu.

“Show us what you got, J.”

Holograms spring up around them depicting still images from traffic and security cameras during the battle. “I detected two odd energy flares happening during a lull in the battle, but did not take further note of them at the time,” J begins, sounding apologetic. Tony bites his lip, quelling the urge to comfort his AI while the screens blank out and return with video of Loki crawling his way out of Hulk’s little smash pit upstairs – then one angle switches to show an Iron Man suit flying to a stop just beyond the busted windows while another shows a Cap lookalike walking into the lobby.

Tony’s eyebrows raise, then his jaw drops as the suit melts away to reveal a copy of himself about a dozen years older. The copy slips behind a pillar and makes a quip about Cap’s ass that Tony fully expects to hear splutterings about –

“Who’s this guy?” Bruce asks when the elevator doors open in the penthouse, pointing to a feed from one of the stairwells of a guy in casual clothes gripping a silver briefcase in one hand and holding the stair railing in a deathgrip with the other, his face conveniently shrouded by a New York Yankees ballcap.

“Were you able to hack their comms, J?” Tony asks.

J answers with a new disembodied voice mid-rant about how Shield’s STRIKE team _looks_ like bad guys. (Tony shrug-nods to himself, a little disconcerted at how easily he agrees.) A moment later Copy Tony says “You’re up” and flicks something off his shoulder before diving back out of the window as Hulk starts growling about taking the stairs.

The view of their elevator shrinks so the STRIKE team’s elevator becomes more dominant – just as the doors open for the Cap lookalike to stroll in. He makes noises about taking the scepter, totally straight-faced when he tells New Coulson that they got word someone was trying to steal it and greets a fanboying member (“You know Rumlow?” Natasha asks. “Nope. Didn’t catch his name today, either,” Cap replies) –

_“Wow. I don’t blame you,”_ Yankees Guy says to Hulk’s bluster about stairs, sounding a hell of a lot like Cap. Again. What the hell? An arm peeks out from one of the stairwell entries, pointing at Hulk’s awkward foot placement as he commiserates.

“Explains why me feet hurt,” Bruce mutters –

“WHAT?” Cap squawks, and J helpfully pauses the other feeds to rewind and amplify the sound on the STRIKE team’s elevator as mock-Cap leans in toward New Coulson and whispers . . . .

“Well that’s a blast from the past,” Tony says.

“What’s Hydra?” Natasha asks.

“One of Cap’s mortal enemies from the War, I think,” Barton says. “Coulson’s mentioned ‘em a few times –”

“They’re a dead Nazi sect – you know _Indiana Jones_? It’s based offa them,” Tony finishes.

“Not so dead,” Barton counters, pointing at the screen. “Jasper might’ve released the case from sheer surprise, but he hasn’t tried to take it back. And Rollins has let go of his weapon. There’s something up with that.”

Cap’s teeth audibly grind as he glares at his smirking doppelganger’s exit, and Tony’s relieved it’s just a hologram – and then Disembodied Voice asks Copy Tony if he’s wearing Ax body spray, pulling his focus into the lobby.

“So that’s what stinks,” someone mutters – Tony can’t look away from the screen to find out who. A full-body tremor erupts from his hands as his Copy casually encourages the Voice to temporarily kill him. His vision narrows as he watches himself collapse, the ringing silence of space enclosing him again . . . .

“ -ark . . . Star- . . . _Tony!_ ” Something grabs him and he grabs back, blinking at Natasha’s face as he gasps for air. “You’re alright. You’re safe. You got out,” she tells him, eyes never wavering as he sways and blinks the blurriness out of his own. He swallows in a dry throat, nods as he forces himself to calm again. _Shit. I’m in trouble._

Her gaze softens, and Natasha leans in closer. “This is why I said no, before,” she murmurs. “You had just survived multiple attacks on your life and hadn’t gotten a chance to process any of it –”

“You can’t bench me,” he growls.

A corner of her mouth twitches. “Couldn’t if I wanted to,” she assures him, shuffling even closer to murmur, “But that means you’ve gotta work double-time: handle the fallout from this, figure out what the hell’s going on, keep Pepper and the Board happy, _and_ ,” he tries and fails to bite back a flinch as she taps his temple, “get this sorted out. Think you can handle all that?”

His jaw firms and a glare pinches at his eyes. _Challenge accepted – and well played._ She smiles back and releases him.

_“You’ve gotta be shitting me,”_ one of the screen-Caps mutters, and the world widens for actual-Cap to catch his eye . . . and nod.

The next few minutes are a bit of a blur while Tony’s mind struggles to settle. There’s the clang of shields, bickering between Copy Tony and the Voice as the copy slips away. Glass shatters followed by twin grunts as something heavy lands. Something about ‘Bucky’ is mentioned –

_“Jarvis, you read?”_ Cap-the-Third says from behind a desk, jerking Tony back into here-and-now. _“If you’re still in Shield’s database, start digging up anything and everything related to Hydra or the Winter Soldier.”_

A breath catches, a body shifting away from the group while not-Cap admires his ass.

_“When it leads you to Sokovia and Camp Lehigh,”_ Cap-the-Third adds, _“tread very, **very** carefully. I’d rather not lose you if we can help it.”_ Tony’s own breath stills, and he tries to ignore the silent _Again_ in Cap-the-Third’s tone.

“Who or what is this Winter Soldier,” Bruce asks. The holograms freeze.

“The opposite of our Sunshine Patriot, here, I bet,” Tony quips shakily –

“A ghost story from Spyland,” Barton counters. “He’s an assassin with over fifty years’ experience, yet almost no one’s gotten more than a glimpse –”

“James Barnes. Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-nine,” Natasha pipes up from . . . somewhere behind them. They all have to turn – and end up facing her back.

“What?” Cap croaks.

“Nat?” Barton murmurs, edging closer to her.

“When I was . . . ten? maybe twelve, the Red Room had a guest instructor visit for a week,” she began, her voice steady, yet oddly brittle. “He required a girl’s . . . _assistance_ in a mission.” A hand raises to tug and twirl a bit of her hair. “She was supposed to play his daughter, so I should’ve been out of the running. But he insisted on me, when it came time for him to choose.” She releases her hair and straightens, her voice stronger. “I was supposed to have some sweet Western name like Nancy or Annie –”

“Or Natalie?” Tony asks. She sends him a small quirk of a smile that quickly fades.

“On the second day of establishing our identities, I did something dumb than made him laugh, and he called me Becca instead.”

Tony nods encouragement, though he has no idea why that’s important.

“That night he started muttering in his sleep: ‘James Barnes. Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-nine’. Over and over again, like it was something important.” She shrugs, her gaze dropping. “I guess I thought it was his way of getting into character, even though it was the wrong name. I didn’t know what else to think of it, at the time.”

A sharp intake of air like a strangled sob; Tony can’t look away to see who it comes from.

Barton reaches for her arm. “Nat, I don’t see –”

“A mission that was supposed to last a week, ten days at the longest, ended almost two months later, when they surrounded us at the western border,” Natasha overrides him, edging away. “When one of the soldiers started shouting a random list of words, James turned to me and demanded a promise: ‘Keep fighting, Becca. Even if it’s just to get up. They can’t win if you’re still standing.’”

A tiny whine pulls Tony’s gaze to a tear streaking Cap’s cheek. _What am I missing?_

“James was . . . gone. When the words stopped,” Natasha finishes, her hand drifting to play with a necklace at the base of her throat. “And I followed him right back into captivity like a good little duckling. But what he taught me in those two months formed the backbone of my escape years later.”

“And then Odessa happened,” Barton says, fingers reaching to brush at her side. “I always thought that bullet’s trajectory was weird. You were trying to reach him, weren’t you.”

Natasha nods faintly, blinking her way back from memory. “He didn’t know me.”

“J,” Tony says, feeling the privacy of their moment. “Pull up –”

“Already done, Sir,” Jarvis says, another hologram flickering on. “The only Sergeant James Barnes with that serial combination.”

_“Bucky,”_ Cap’s voice cracks weakly as silent videos from World War Two play, their audio lost to time.

A video freezes as Natasha approaches, catching Barnes alone in a serious moment. She reaches out to trace a cheek with a finger, then starts stroking the hair downward. Jarvis intuits her motions and lengthens it to brush Barnes’ shoulders. She adds lines to his left arm next, drawing a pentagram on the bicep and murmuring, “Red on silver.” The arm turns metallic, red star gleaming. Then she hovers her cupped palm over the bottom half of his face. She breathes out, nods and murmurs, “James.”

Movement outside catches Tony’s eye, and he claps to get everyone’s attention. “Alright, that’s it, I’m calling it. Take a couple days for R&R, then we’ll regroup and figure out what the hell. Okay?” Four of the five nod and shuffle out, Cap the only one remaining when Pepper rushes in. Tony buries his nose in her neck, the lingering tease of her perfume settling him like nothing else has since Coulson –

_Shit. Coulson_ _–_

Something murmurs from one of the holograms. Tony releases Pepper just in time for Yankees Cap to add, _“Tell Tony I was wrong . . . and I’m sorry”_ before picking up his case on the bridge and running like a demon’s chasing him, leaving the scepter ( _Wait, what?_ ) behind.

“What’ve you got to be sorry about?” Tony asks.

“I don’t know,” Cap – no. Steve Rogers – snuffles, still unaware of his tears.


End file.
